The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One
ISBN:9781426205415 read summary

In this book, "The World is Blue", Dr. Sylvia Earle, the National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, uses the analogy that Life is like a PC and human beings are wantonly destroying various components in the PC, without realizing that the PC could crash as a result.

If Life is a PC, then humans represent the CPU that is overheating the PC even as it is frying various components on the motherboard. The scary part is that the applications running on just two of the seven cores in the CPU are responsible for most of the overheating and the component frying, since most consumption is occurring due to the top 2 billion of the nearly 7 billion people on the planet. To make matters worse, Bill Gates is dedicating $50B of his money along with $30B from Warren Buffett in order to boot up the same applications on the other five cores in the CPU. One would think that he would spend some of that money to swap out the software on the problem cores, but...

Bill Gates has been crashing PCs for a living. This time, it is serious!

In the case of Life, the crashed PC might take about 10 million years to reboot, going by the last 5 major crashes that have occurred. The last crash was when the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. The rebooted PC will most likely be powered by a brand new CPU, just as the dinosaurs were replaced by mammals and eventually, humans. Therefore, it is a good idea for humans to change the software on the problem cores to prevent all that overheating and component-frying before the Life PC crashes.

Despite the hype on the publicity blurbs, in my opinion, Dr. Earle's book is not the "Silent Spring" of our generation. You won't catch Rachel Carson recommending that humans confine their DDT spraying over 70% of the earth's surface, in the vain hope that the other 30% will clean up the resulting mess.

The Earth has been sending all sorts of signals that it cannot support even 2 billion human ultissimo predators, to use Dr. Earle's characterization. It is not right for her to criticize the Japanese and Norwegian predilection for whale meat, while defending the American appetite for beef. Yes, there are a billion odd cows on the planet while there are only a few thousand whales left, but all those cows didn't materialize in natural ecosystems. While the Americans may not have eaten all the mountain lions, the Indians may not have eaten all the tigers and the Chinese may not have eaten all the giant Pandas, they might as well all have done so. They certainly caused the habitat losses that has resulted in the near extinction of these magnificent animals through their appetite for beef, milk and pork, respectively.

Therefore, it doesn't make sense for Dr. Earle to claim that humans can somehow optimize the Earth's photosynthetic bounty through careful resource management, and thus make the earth sustainably support 9 billion human ultissimo predators in the future. I wouldn't think so. At least, not a chance as predators.

It would seem that there is no way of stopping the Life PC from crashing without changing the software in those two problem CPU cores and before it infects the other cores. The new software should have sound power management to prevent overheating and must respect the roles of all the components in the PC to ensure that they don't get fried. That requires a spiritual awakening among the top 2 billion human consumers worldwide, which cannot be achieved by reserving 30% of the ocean as marine sanctuaries, while encouraging depredation on the remaining 70% of the high seas.

Despite these reservations, Dr. Earle makes an important contribution by bringing to light human impact on the ocean, for which I highly recommend this book. However, I wish the editors had done a better job of fact-checking the statistics in the book. On page 10, does the ocean really occupy just 331,441 square kilometers of the surface area of the Earth? Wikipedia says that it is ~361 million square kilometers.

Sylvia Earle's The World is Blue is the kind of book that serves well as an introduction to the concept of Oceanspace. Indeed, it is more than just an introduction. It is a pail of cold water thrown upon anyone still asleep to the fact that humanity is committing suicide -- and in the process, is despoiling the habitat of many other species who are just trying to do their day job. I would recommend this book to anyone who hasn't thought about the subject before. Maritime analysts and marine biologists might find it a bit of a bore, but one can't please everyone.

Earle was the former Chief Scientist for the U.S. NOAA in 1990 and her work reveals this pedigree in many ways. Her writing is clean and straightforward; she provides plenty of interesting personal anecdotes to liven up what might otherwise be a dull litany of sins and penances; she seems particularly enamored of the authority of international and national organizations without any clear idea of how to resolve the problem and limits of power; and she supplies ample statistics and information to back up claims of destruction and unsustainability.

With respect to the latter, we have seen the pernicious political ramifications of poor factchecking. Get one trivial detail wrong, and large swaths of humanity will promptly disregard your message no matter how important, as if they themselves had never made a single mistake in their life.

It is moderately worrisome to me, then, that at random I found a claim (p.139) that a thousand years ago there were fewer than 300,000 people on Earth. Oops. It was actually 300 million. Whoever was Earle's factchecker was must now commit seppuku, preferably with a sushi knife, to atone for this shame. Thousands, millions, what's the difference? Well the difference is that when you write a book about sustainability or unsustainability, you have to get the numbers right. Because in the final analysis, sustainability is a simple equation of (consumption per capita) x (total population) = (total consumption). Overfishing is a total load problem. Pollution is a total load problem. Humanity is a total load problem.

Anyhoo. I haven't checked all the other numbers and I don't intend to. I don't even claim the necessary expertise to do so. One slip of the pen does not a spilled inkwell make. I will just assume that all the other facts and factoids in the book are reasonably accurate and move on to the next subject: compliance.

"There oughta be a law!" or its international equivalent, "There oughta be a treaty!" holds no water today. Or it's a leaky hull, let's put it that way. You make a law, you make a treaty, you better damn well back it up with military/police force. Otherwise it's just grand kabuki theatre on a planetary scale. I find no fault at all with Earle's recommendations on what to do to conserve marine life. Mysteriously absent are the recommendations on what to do when people and nations, some of them armed, refuse to cooperate. Maybe Earle just doesn't want to go there because she knows the answer.

One of the most important books you will ever read.
Pick your five or ten best friends and send a copy to them.

This is truly a must-read for all parents, grandparents, and all who care about the future. Famous explorer/oceanographer, Jacques Cousteau once said "if the oceans die, we will not be far behind." He said that 30 years ago and things have gotten much worse with acidification of our oceans from CO2 absorption (the actual pH balance changing to acid and killing our coral reefs and marine life).

This should be taught in all schools. The book is well written and very educational, but an easy read for lay persons.

This book was delivered promptly and in perfect shape. The book's message is extremely important for all of us.